Prospects for Revived Mideast Peace Efforts

[Deutsche Welle-Germany]
Patrick Vanhulle -
"The Israelis have proven four years ago, when they evacuated all of the Gaza Strip, that they are willing to pay a price if they think that a better future will follow. But the Israeli experience with these kind of removals has been very bitter," analyst Gil Yaron told Deutsche Welle. Silke Tempel, editor-in-chief of the German Council of Foreign Relations' bimonthly magazine Internationale Politik, agreed that over the past years the Palestinians in Gaza have only made things worse. "After the withdrawal from Gaza," she said, "Israel got a whole range of rocket attacks. That really did not help."
Yaron warned that "There is a Palestinian partner on the other side that is completely divided into two entities. We have the Hamas state in the Gaza Strip and the Fatah state in the West Bank. There is no unity on the horizon on the Palestinian side. Whatever President Mahmoud Abbas says does not seem to be binding for Hamas." Yaron also notes that the Israelis have a different time frame than the West: "The West wants to solve the Palestinian problem first and then look at the Middle East as a whole. The Israelis say: before we solve the Iranian problem, we cannot solve anything else, because the Iranians are the ones that are pulling the strings behind terror organizations like Hizbullah and Hamas."
2009-08-28 08:00:00Full Article